Edson: Oil probers run into slippery, complex puzzle
By Peter Edson
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
The following is the second part of Ernie Pyle’s account of the bombing raid in which he had a narrow escape. His story is Lt. von Ripper will be resumed later.
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
When our bombing was over, my room was a shambles. It was the sort of thing you see only in the movies.
More than half the room was knee-deep with broken brick and tiles and mortar. The other half was a disarray, all covered with plaster dust and broken glass. My typewriter was full of mortar and broken glass, but was not damaged.
My pants had been lying on the chair that went through the door, so I dug them out from under the debris, put them on and started down to the other half of the house.
Down below everything was a mess. The ceilings had come down upon men still in bed. Some beds were a foot deep in debris. That nobody was killed was a pure miracle.
Bill Strand of The Chicago Tribune was out in the littered hallway in his underwear, holding his left arm. Maj. Jay Vessels of Duluth, Minnesota, was running around without a stitch of clothing. We checked rapidly and found that everybody was still alive.
The boys couldn’t believe it when they saw me coming in. Wick Fowler of The Dallas News had thought the bombs had made direct hits on the upper part of the house. He had just said to George Tucker of the Associated Press, “Well, they got Ernie.”
‘Old Indestructible’
But after they saw I was all right, they began to laugh and called me “Old Indestructible.” I guess I was the luckiest man in the house, at that, although old Dame Fortune was certainly riding with all of us that morning.
The German raiders had dropped a whole stick of bombs right across our area. They were apparently 500-pounders, and they hit within 30 feet of our house.
Many odd things happened, as they do in all bombings. Truthfully, I don’t remember my walls coming down at all, though I must have been looking at them when they fell.
Oddly, the wall that fell on my bed was across the room from where the bomb hit. In other words, it fell toward the bomb. That is caused by the bomb’s terrific blast creating a vacuum; when air rushes back to the center of that vacuum, its power is as great as the original rush of air outward.
At night, I always put a pack of cigarettes on the floor beside my bed. When I went to get a cigarette after the bombing, I found they’d all been blown out of the park.
The cot occupied by Bob Vermillion of the United Press was covered a foot deep with broken tile and plaster. When it was all over somebody heard him call out plaintively:
Will somebody come and take this stuff off of me?
First aid of sorts
After seeing the other correspondents, I went back to my shattered room to look around again, and in came Sgt. Bob Geake of Fort Wayne, Indiana, the first sergeant of our outfit. He had some iodine, and was going around painting up those who had been scratched.
Bob took out a dirty handkerchief, spit on it two or three times, then washed the blood off my face before putting on the iodine, which could hardly be called the last word in sterilization.
Three of the other boys were rushed off to the tent hospital. After an hour or so, five of us drove out to the hospital in a jeep to see how they were.
We found them not in bad shape, and then we sat around a stove in one of the tents and drank coffee and talked with some of the officers.
By now my head and ears had started to ache from the concussion blasts, and several of the others were feeling the same, so the doctors have us codeine and aspirin.
Much to my surprise, I wasn’t weak or shaky after it was all over. In fact, I felt fine – partly buoyed up by elation over still being alive, I suppose. But by noon, I was starting to get jumpy, and by mid-afternoon I felt very old and “beat up,” as they say, and the passage of the afternoon shells over our house really gave me the woolies.
Stokes: Willkie’s limb
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Willkie in Wisconsin –
Governor Dewey of New York is very much the man who isn’t here.
Wendell Willkie has him constantly on his mind.
In his campaign here for Wisconsin delegates in the April 4 primary, the 1940 Republican candidate strikes at his rival for the 1944 nomination without naming him, by using him as a symbol of the type of candidate who refuses to discuss the issues as he himself is discussing them in his tour through this state.
Mr. Willkie gets into the subject by listing three categories of Republican candidates.
First, representatives of “narrow nationalism and economic Toryism.” In conversations, he includes Gen. MacArthur, who is entered in the primary, in this category as well as Governor Bricker of Ohio, who is not a candidate here, though he names neither publicly.
Second, those who would avoid the issues and depend upon rallying all sorts of elements to their banners. In this he includes Governor Dewey, who has a nearly complete slate in the primary.
Third, those who believe in international cooperation and an expanding domestic economy that recognizes social advances. In this he includes, principally, Wendell Willkie.
GOP can’t win if–
The Republican Party, he says, cannot possibly win if it nominates anybody in the first two categories.
It cannot help but win, he predicts, if it nominates a representative of the third category – again, Wendell Willkie.
In his calculations, Mr. Willkie is largely overlooking Gen. MacArthur and LtCdr. Harold Stassen, ex-Governor of Minnesota, who is also entered in the primary because he does not think either will cut much of a figure. It would be hard, too, for him to attack LtCdr. Stassen because the latter, his floor manager at Philadelphia in 1940, fits into Mr. Willkie’s own private third category.
Governor Dewey is the man he fears here. Political analysts tell you that this is, basically, a Dewey state, and that if it weren’t for the confusion over whether Governor Dewey is a candidate, he would easily come out on top. Governor Dewey tried to withdraw his delegates on the plea that he isn’t a candidate, but some 16 of them stayed in the race. But people out here take Mr. Dewey more at his word than do more cynical Easterners.
Over and over again
So, Mr. Willkie hammers over and over again on the theme he expressed most succinctly at Oshkosh, in describing the second category:
There is another group of delegates who say they should be elected on the basis of no discussion of the issues at all. They represent the argument that if a man says he is not a candidate, then you can tell the people that you represent all the divergent elements on America. The 1944 convention, them, would be not a convention of principle but merely a political convention, a depending for nomination through cleverness. There must be no hotel-room nomination.
The inference from Mr. Willkie’s discussion of the Republican Party and what it should be and should do is that if does not follow his prescription he cannot go along with it.
Mr. Willkie is glad to have this inference get out and the interpretation that goes along with it, namely, that he might bolt the party and lead a third party or independent movement. But nobody who knows Mr. Willkie well takes any stock in any third party movement. He, himself, has made a careful examination of state laws and discovered that third parties can get on ballots in only a negligible number of states.
His dissent rather would take the form of refusing to support the Republican candidate, perhaps even supporting Mr. Roosevelt.
He is working himself out that far on the limb.
‘Patsy’ Lonergan’s escort on eve of killing may explode bombshell at cadet’s trial
Mario Gabelline believes she knew husband was home awaiting her
By Paz Van Matre, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Six jurors selected in cadet’s case
Clashes lacking at second trial
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A wounded Marine remembers –
Peggy Hull: His buddy got Purple Heart, too
There’s no pride in voice as he tells of fighting and death in Pacific
By Peggy Hull, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Syracuse plans comeback
Syracuse, New York –
Syracuse University will hold spring football practice to determine if sufficient players are available to field a team next fall, athletic officials have announced.
Any suppressed desires?
Let Yourself Go to be premiered on air
People get paid for stunt ideas
By Si Steinhauser
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Willkie warns of federal rule
Every ill exploited, candidate declares
Ripon, Wisconsin (UP) –
Charging that the Democratic Party was “a vehicle for the maintenance of power,” Wendell L. Willkie last night accused the New Deal of aiming at “eventual adoption of a government-controlled society.”
The candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, speaking in the town where the GOP was organized 90 years ago, charged that the New Deal had exploited the theory that the only solution for “every ill” was complete government control.
The speech was Mr. Willkie’s second in his campaign to win the support of Wisconsin delegates to the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Willkie said:
The panic of 1929 and the devastating years that followed gave impetus and encouragement to the thesis that the solution lay solely in government control.
The total result, consistently fostered by the administration, has been the illusion that there is conflict between a society built upon economic incentive and a society of human welfare.
Mr. Willkie said that the modern Democratic Party:
…provides us with a clear example of… subversion, by which an inner group has carefully nurtured its power for 12 years.
Völkischer Beobachter (March 22, 1944)
Pazifikoffensive an Stoßkraft eingebüßt –
US-Flotte an der Grenze ihrer Leistungsfähigkeit
Eigener Bericht des „Völkischen Beobachters“
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U.S. Navy Department (March 22, 1944)
Communiqué No. 513
The submarine USS SCORPION (SS-278) is overdue from patrol and must be presumed to be lost.
The next of kin of casualties of the SCORPION, have been so notified.
CINCPAC Press Release No. 322
For Immediate Release
March 22, 1944
Mitchell medium bombers of the 7th Army Air Force, Dauntless dive bombers and Hellcat and Corsair fighters of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing and Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed four enemy positions in the Marshall Islands on March 20, 1944 (West Longitude Date).
Heavy explosion was observed on one of the objectives, and several smaller explosions and fires observed on another. Anti-aircraft fire ranged from moderate to meager. All of our planes returned.
The New York Times (March 22, 1944)
VESUVIUS FORCES MAY MORE TO FLEE
Lava threatens to cut shore highway and oust other villagers in the area
Crater pours streams; two children killed when a water tank explodes after boiling over ashes
By Milton Bracker
Cercola, Italy –
Smashing through San Sebastiano and Massa di Somma on a broadening, though generally slowing, front, the Vesuvian lava flow tonight had resulted in complete evacuation of this town of 7,000, two miles to the northwest.
At the same time, reports reaching field headquarters established here by Lt. Col. Charles Poletti, AMG chief in Italy, indicated imminent danger at Torre del Greco, on the coast between Naples and Torre Annunziata, with the possibility that a further breakthrough of the southern rim of the crater would cut the vital shoreline highway and force a far greater evacuation than has yet been necessitated.
The volcano put up another spectacular show tonight, although the encroachment of lava between buried San Sebastiano and this truck-cluttered town was less than early this morning. The fiercest displays were on the slopes above coastal towns, with red jets leaping high in the air and spilling down the sides in multiple new streams.
Dust spurts from crater
One of the most awesome spectacles of the entire eruptive period came at 5:30 p.m. CET, when a seething plume of gray lava dust billowed from the crater.
“That’s what killed Pompeii,” mused Lt. Col. James L. Kincaid, AMG executive for Naples Province, as he watched from the balcony of the threatened City Hall here.
He also revealed that two children were killed at San Sebastiano yesterday when lava reached a water tank, which exploded in a great hiss of steam, throwing them high in the air. So far as is known, theirs are the only deaths so far.
Another official observer at Cercola was Prof. Giuseppe Imbò, director of the Royal Vesuvian Observatory, who said the current phenomenon was completely different from that which overwhelmed Pompeii in 79 AD. He conceded the danger of further inundation by molten rock, but he said the exact situation would remain unclear, possibly for several days.
The entire semicircle from Torre Annunziata around to Santa Anastasia is more or less under the shadow of the worst eruption since 1906. This poses a serious problem for the Allied authorities and is diverting hundreds of men and vehicles from normal work.
Roads leading here are choked with trucks and laden with household supplies. On the direct road from San Sebastiano, families huddled over fires lit in doorways waiting for soldiers to assist them in loading.
At San Sebastiano, the end of the road is cut off by a crunching wall of lava, which is following the road’s axis directly toward the south end of the town.
People move before lava
Life in this stricken town revolved around the Town Hall, in front of which the Army has set up a food kitchen. Long lines of women and children waited hours for a share of available soup, cheese and bread. Meanwhile, men helped to move out belongings, and the streets are packed with bent figures carrying pieces of furniture larger than themselves.
AMG officials estimated that there were at least 4,000 refugees already, many of whom have been taken to a Naples refugee camp. Others went to Santa Anastasia and Aversa.
The last moment of San Sebastiano came about 3:15 a.m., when a seething mass 12 feet high burst across, the main street and the bridge in the center. A three-story yellow schoolhouse disappeared as in a fiery meatgrinder. So did a nearby wine shop in which the tall figure of San Gennaro, patron saint of the province, had been stored earlier after a priest had used it to help quiet the populace.
Cercola seemed tonight to have an excellent chance of escaping complete destruction, although it is most likely that both ends will be chewed off by the flanks of the inexorable foe. An outlying school has already been devoured.
Col. Poletti is hopeful that, once past here, the stream will dissipate itself in the flat terrain.